There are two major means of transmitting content that currently see widespread use. The first of these might be called “traditional broadcasting,” and includes forms of broadcasting like “high-power/high-tower” terrestrial broadcasting and satellite broadcasting. The second of these, bi-directional network communication, includes 3G and 4G wireless telecommunications networks and serves as the basis for the mobile internet. Each of these has certain advantages and disadvantages for transmitting content.
Traditional broadcasting generally has the advantages of low cost and broad coverage. Traditional broadcasting offers “one-to-many” broadcasting with almost zero marginal cost as new devices are added. Typically, traditional broadcasting is the best or only way to get broad coverage geographically, and is almost always the best way to cover highways, rural areas, and other remote areas. Traditional broadcasting typically is most efficient in delivering live, common, and popular contents; this is especially true when combined with push services, such that content can be stored at the time it is broadcasted and played later.
However, traditional broadcasting also suffers from a number of downsides that limit its performance in urban and other environments. Satellite broadcasting is constrained in line-of-sight (LOS) conditions, and while this typically offers coverage to a large area, it can often be heavily constrained by terrain features. Coverage is typically bad in an urban environment, meaning that a broadcaster has to rely heavily on a ground repeater network, which can be expensive to build and maintain. Traditional broadcast is also usually designed as worst-case bounded and usually have to use low-order coding and modulation, leading to poor system efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is also typically not suited for interactive behavior and customized content; what satellite internet services exist often have very high latencies and very low upload speeds.
Bi-directional network communication has several advantages of its own. It typically has good coverage in urban and developed areas, and its infrastructure is improving. It also offers much better performance for delivering interactive and customized content.
However, it also suffers from certain notable disadvantages. In particular, it is much more costly to operate, assuming a large user base; while traditional broadcasting has close to zero marginal cost because it transmits the same content to many different users at one time, bi-directional network communication operates on a one-to-one basis: the same content being transmitted to each user many times, and as a result the cost increases linearly with the number of users. Also, the bi-directional network's coverage is generally not good in rural and remote areas because of a lack of potential users.